Catholic Church Moves to Defrock Priests Who Use Abuse Authority for Sexual Acts

Pope Francis announced Tuesday that priests and laypeople who hold church office can be explicitly punished for sexually abusing minors and adults.

The new provisions, which aim to address the shortcomings of the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse, also now officially recognize the "grooming" of minors or vulnerable adults as a criminal act of sexual exploitation.

The law also makes it clear that bishops and religious leaders can be held responsible for omission or negligence in failing to properly investigate and punish guilty priests.

"A member of an institute of consecrated life or of a society of apostolic life, or any one of the faithful who enjoys a dignity or performs an office or function in the Church, who commits" sexual abuse is to be punished "according to the gravity of the offense," the law states.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below:

Ever since the 1983 Code was first issued, lawyers and bishops have complained it was completely inadequate to deal with the sexual abuse of minors, since it required time-consuming trials. Victims and their advocates, meanwhile, argued it left too much discretion in the hands of bishops who had an interest in covering up for their priests.

The Vatican issued piecemeal changes over the years to address the problems and loopholes, most significantly requiring all cases to be sent to the Holy See for review and allowing for a more streamlined administrative process to defrock a priest if the evidence against him was overwhelming.

More recently, Francis passed new laws to punish bishops and religious superiors who failed to protect their flocks. The new criminal code incorporates those changes and goes beyond them, while also recognizing accused priests are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

According to the new law, priests who engage in sexual acts with anyone — not just a minor or someone who lacks the use of reason — can be defrocked if they used "force, threats or abuse of his authority" to engage in sexual acts.

Monsignor Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Vatican's legal office, said that could cover any rank-and-file member of the church who is sexually abused by a priest if it can be shown that the priest used force or abused his authority.

That provision is contained in a section detailing violations of the priest's obligation to remain celibate. Another section of the law concerns priestly crimes against the dignity of others, including sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults.

The law doesn't explicitly define which adults are covered, saying only an adult who "habitually has an imperfect use of reason" or for "whom the law recognizes equal protection."

The Vatican has long considered any sexual relations between a priest and an adult as sinful but consensual, believing that adults are able to offer or refuse consent purely by the nature of their age. But amid the #MeToo movement and scandals of seminarians and nuns being sexually abused by their superiors, the Vatican has come to realize that adults can be victimized too if there is a power imbalance in the relationship.

That dynamic was most clearly recognized in the scandal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington. Even though the Vatican knew for years he slept with his seminarians, McCarrick was only put on trial after someone came forward saying he had abused him as a youth. Francis eventually defrocked him in 2019.

In a novelty aimed at addressing sex crimes committed by laypeople who hold church offices, founders of lay religious movements or even parish accountants and administrators, the new law says laypeople can be similarly punished if they abuse their authority to engage in sexual crimes.

Since these laypeople can't be defrocked, penalties include losing their jobs, paying fines or being removed from their communities.

The need for such a provision was made clear in the scandal involving Luis Figari, the lay founder of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a conservative movement that has 20,000 members and chapters throughout South America and the U.S.

An independent investigation concluded Figari was a paranoid narcissist obsessed with sex and watching his underlings endure pain and humiliation. But the Vatican and local church dithered for years on how to sanction him, ultimately deciding to remove him from Peru and isolate him from the community.

The new law takes effect on Dec. 8.